George Packer got Michael O’Hanlon, he of the “infamous”:http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/31/ohanlon/index.html “op-ed”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html extolling the suc­cesses in Iraq, and “man­aged to suss out some details”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2007/08/ohanlon-and-pol.html:

He spoke with very few Iraqis and could inde­pen­dently con­firm very lit­tle of what he heard from Amer­i­can offi­cials. In eight days he trav­elled to half a dozen cities — *that’s not much time in each*. The evi­dence that four or five Iraqi Army divi­sions, with most of their bad com­man­ders weeded out, are now capa­ble of hold­ing, for exam­ple, Mosul and Tal Afar, *came from Amer­i­can mil­i­tary sources*. Pol­lack found that U.S. offi­cers sounded much more real­is­tic than on his pre­vi­ous trip, in late 2005. He gauged their reli­a­bil­ity in answers they gave to ques­tions that he asked “offline,” after a brief­ing — there was a min­i­mum of happy talk, but also a min­i­mum of dire gloom. The improve­ments in secu­rity, he said, are “rel­a­tive,” *which is a heavy qual­i­fi­ca­tion, given the extreme vio­lence of 2006 and early 2007*. And it’s far from clear that progress any­where is sus­tain­able. Every­where he went, the line Pol­lack heard was that *the cen­tral gov­ern­ment in Bagh­dad is bro­ken and the only solu­tions that can work are local ones*. (My emphasis.)

Yeah, that’s pretty much what I expected. From my time in Iraq, I would often hear from local com­man­ders who would tell me how great and suc­cess­ful their local area was going, but who couldn’t give me a broader pic­ture. (How could they? They were busy try­ing to deal with micro-level stuff.) The com­man­ders and embassy briefers who offered back­grounders rarely seemed to have feet planted in real­ity that I could see with my own eyes liv­ing out­side the Green Zone. (The CPA was the worst, by far. It was bet­ter under Khalilzad, who was more of a straight-shooter when he was on back­ground.)
But back to the “op-ed”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html. O’Hanlon and Pol­lack have appar­ently tried to walk back a bit from their tri­umphal tone that was prob­a­bly what riled so many peo­ple up. (The head­line wasn’t theirs, so cut them some slack on that one.) And they did have some caveats about the polit­i­cal process hav­ing “huge hur­dles” to over­come. But while they may not have meant to deceive in their obser­va­tions of what sound like real improve­ments in secu­rity, they should have known that war sup­port­ers in the White House and in the media would leap on their piece like it was a life pre­server and use it in ways they may not have intended.
I’m sur­prised at the pair’s naivety in the writ­ing and mar­ket­ing of this piece. And I’m also sur­prised at their naivety in tak­ing such a lim­ited col­lec­tion of data as paint­ing a fuller pic­ture than there is in Iraq.